


Everything is Illuminated

by newandykes



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Edmunds' Planet, F/M, LITERALLY, M/M, Post-Canon, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 09:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3204125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newandykes/pseuds/newandykes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It turns out they don't have all the time in the world.</i><br/>Or, the one where Mann doesn't kill Romilly and they have enough fuel to make it around Gargantua.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything is Illuminated

> If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.  ** _Everything Is Illuminated,_** **Jonathan Safran Foer.**

 

 

 

In the centre of Edmunds' station, there is a large display screen showing their new planet. In red are their research pods, and in yellow are the already advancing crop sprouts they had planted the month before. When the first of the ships had come from Earth, Murphy had not been onboard.

"They just can't make it," Brand had said, "Not now. She'll come, eventually."

"They all will," Romilly had added.

But for now, it is just the four of them; or six, if you count SAFE and TARS. Every few months they are visited by a transport team, laden with supplies, and Cooper will stare grimly at whatever bag of seed he has opened up and say, "I got  _paid_ to do this back on Earth." 

He just wants to leave. 

 

 

 

They give him the equipment he asks for and a pod to work out of, and they leave him well enough alone. They have long since moved past suspecting him of further treachery, even if Brand still looks at him with thinly veiled dislike. So he stays well enough away, too. 

None but Cooper speak to him on a day-to-day basis; Cooper, who has wordlessly accepted the task of monitoring him, makes the fifty meter trek from the communal pod to Mann's each day, coffee in hand. He lies and says that he's just being friendly, but Mann sees the way his eyes scan Mann's various tinkerings, searching for something that could be of harm. Still, he does not seem to remember his attempted homicide; Mann would say he hates him for it, but, then, that would be a lie as well. 

 

 

 

(They are not afraid of him, and they do not suspect him. But they do worry.) 

 

 

 

The dirt on Edmunds is rich with protein; a lot different to anything Mann had found on his own planet. He spends hours hunched over a microscope in his private pod, indulging those sadistic childhood tendencies by poking and prodding at all the beetles he has found with a scalpel.

So far, no diseases. He just hopes it stays that way. 

 

 

 

In Edmunds' solar system, the sun is large and incorrigible, the night seeming to draw in stealthily after so long a time spent in the light. It creeps across the horizon with inky black fingers, unnoticed until it is within an inch of their little station. TARS calls it romantic, soft and gentle like that poem of Dr. Brand's, but Cooper says it's a nuisance. Somehow, somebody always forgets to check the clock, and every time they are left stranded in the dark. 

"Then you shouldn't have left this with me," Murphy said one day, and she had waved Cooper's watch in front of the communications screen. 

"Well, you can give it to me in person soon," Cooper replied, and hoped it was the truth. 

Mann had looked up from his work station then, magnifying visor cloudy with breath, and asked for her to bring him a new dirt sieve. His was leaking.     

"I'll write a note." 

 

 

 

They talk about organisms; non-cellular, mostly; viruses that will soon take up home on this strange new planet and that will need to be eradicated. Mann watches on the edge of his seat while Cooper pours over the work he has been doing, asking questions with a soft, animated smile on his face (one that they rarely see nowadays). The conversation lulls and strains, sometimes stops altogether, but Mann doesn't feel the need to fill the silence. And when he presses his lips softly against Cooper's own, the old pilot only sighs and says,

"Let's just focus on this macromolecular stuff for now, okay doc?"

The days here are nearly eighty hours long, three times what the night is, and Mann wishes they were less. There is something deeply unsettling about falling asleep and waking to find that nothing has changed, that the rocks on Edmunds' planet are still their same tan-yellow, and the sun still hangs at its white, pearly axis beyond the cloud line. 

(He never sees Cooper and Brand sleep, and when he visits Brand's research pod to deliver her coffee, he finds the couch in a state of disarray, as if it has just been slept on.

 _These people don't have an off switch,_ he thinks.

He was the same once, also.) 

 

 

 

The corn grows far too tall - freakishly so - and thickly. Cooper is forced to navigate the fields with a plastic bin-top slung across one forearm, shield-like, in order to stop the stalks from snapping back and hitting him in the face. That month, they harvest cob samples that are swollen like footballs and ship them back to Earth for inspection. 

When Cooper is out on a scouting mission, Mann approaches Romilly and asks him if he can take a root clipping from the field. 

"Sure, but why?" 

"Just a hunch." 

By the time Cooper and Brand return, their rover flecked orange with dust, Mann is already out in the field, squatting over a rack of test-tubes with his little plastic scoop. 

"What's he doing?" Brand asks, squinting through the steady growing sunshine. 

"Looking for water," says CASE.

 

 

 

"The roots have trace samples of sodium in them," Mann says, ambushing Brand by the drinks dispenser. It's lunch - one of the few times she is not busy working - and Mann wants her full and undivided attention, as grudging as it might be.

"Sea salt," he repeats, watching, smiling, hopeful as she places her glass of water on the countertop. "Similar to what we have on Earth."

"So?" Brand says, shrugging, "There was an ocean here once."  

"No no no, you see the -" he begins to rifle through his work satchel, pulling out various data and spreadsheets for her to inspect, "- the salt here is almost sedimentary, it - it's been forced  _upwards_ , through the soil." 

Brand's brow furrows. 

"How is that not damaging the crop?"

"I believe that they are getting their water from a clean source; a source that's salt concentration has long since been deposited above ground. Whatever, uh,  _excess_ salt I found in the roots was simply absorbed from the topsoil over time. Apart from that, the soil's really very healthy." 

"What does this have to do with a clean source?" 

"Well, it's not just the corn crop." 

Brand raises her eyebrows, and for the first time in a long time Mann is starting to feel useful. He begins to stand a little straighter. 

"I think we're standing on our ocean, Dr. Brand." 

 

 

 

Drilling begins almost immediately, everyone on Earth already eager for change. With the arrival of the mining equipment comes Murphy Cooper; older, wiser, her hair cut a little shorter than usual to better accommodate her helmet. And when she smiles (she has her mother's mouth, nose, ears) Cooper's legs go out from under him.

Time runs slow here, they have discovered; not as slow as on Miller's planet, but just enough to tip them off balance. She is at least a year older than her father. Cooper can only shudder at what might have happened if they had not had enough fuel to pass around Gargantua. The word _decades_ rattles around inside his head like a pair of keys in a glovebox. A hundred years could have passed. 

But Murphy is still little enough that he can ruffle her hair, and he is almost relieved when she begins to gently weep, letting herself be held by him. He had worried for a long time that she still, secretly, hated him; hated him like she did the day he left her crying in the dust back on Earth. But now he knows that that has never been true. 

Save for these rare few moments of weakness, Murphy holds herself tall and proud, like a gladiator entering the ring. The crew onboard the transport ship seem to hold her in high regard, but it is only when one of them lets slip a, "Yes, ma'am," that they realise just how high up in the ranks she really is. 

"After your father died, I... I sort of took the helm," she explains, awkwardly, to Brand. 

Rather than getting angry, Brand simply squeezes her shoulder and says, "I'm  _glad_ it was you." 

 

 

 

Cooper spends all his time with Murphy, and Mann can't help but feel a twinge of jealousy at that. Gone are Cooper's morning treks to his research pod. Gone is his careful analysis. Mann is no longer his chiefest worry.

But Mann can't help but feel guilty in her presence; this warm-voiced daughter of Cooper's with her red hair hanging like a halo around her head, stark black against Edmunds' setting sun. She does not know, not yet (there is a certain code of silence amongst them when it comes to Mann's attempted homicide), but the truth will come out eventually.

"This is the man that tried to kill your father."  

For now, though, she is sweet as pie. Mann doesn't know which is worse.

(She had said, "Hi!" to him when they first met, embracing him tightly and telling him he had been, "So, so brave."

Mann had thought,  _No, Murphy, I was the exact opposite of that._ ) 

 

 

 

Brand has her doubts about sending Mann down the shaft. This is her planet, after all - inherited from her lover by rite - and she was the first to set foot here, jumping out of the _Endurance,_ desperate for that maybe, possibly,  _somehow..._ But they had found his bones forthrightly. 

While Mann had festered away in quarantine, closely observed by TARS and CASE until he could be deemed fit for duty, they were already setting up camp. And by the time Mann was let out, Brand was already expanding her horizons to the lakes in the north, searching for the ocean that they had now found. And she had not forgotten about him; had not forgotten him trying to rip out Cooper's communications cord; had not forgotten about him crashing his space helmet against her co-pilot's. 

"He's not in a right state of mind," he hears her saying to Cooper one night, "He's _insane_ , Joseph." 

"No," Cooper had replied, resolutely, "He's not. He's _crazy_." 

"What's the difference?" 

Mann never does get the answer, but after some calming down, Cooper convinces Brand that  _no,_ Mann is not going to poison their crops' water supply in a sudden lapse back into madness, and that  _yes,_ he is ready to be left alone for a while. Well and truly. 

 

 

 

Today, Cooper visits him in his pod for the first time in weeks, customary cup of coffee in hand.

"You should dress for the weather. It'll be cold down there."

Mann nods and returns to his work.

And if Cooper seems to falter a little, shuffling around in the dirt outside the pod door, rubbing a hand over his mouth, Mann is sure it's because he's nervous like the rest of them. 

 

 

 

It seems to take a long time to reach the base of the cavern, though Romilly tells him it is not very far down. He takes the stairs in steady strides, his boots clanking against the cool metal. He can just make out a shining black object in the distance, and as he levels his torch he sees that it is CASE, stationed on the sand beside the dinghy.

The cavern is wide but low ceilinged. Mann has to duck as he makes his way towards CASE, and can't help but wonder how the robot made it to where it is now. 

"Ready?" it says, without a hint of worry or suspicion or fear. Mann feels the tension drain out of his shoulders.

"Ready."  

 

 

 

They talk as they cut through the darkness, and CASE asks if Murphy knows yet.

"Not yet," Mann says.

"Are you going to ask for an appeal when you get back to Earth?"

"No," he sighs, "What's the point?"  

Something whirs deep within CASE, cameras zooming in, sensors adjusting.

"Don't you wanna go home?"

"There's nothing for me there. Not now."

"Now you're just being dramatic."

"Maybe."

"Maybe not." 

 

 

 

There is no tidal pull in this underground ocean. Mann can boat for hours without a single dip or rise in the water level, and he is never brought any closer to the cavern roof.

"There's this joke," Mann says, "What do you get when you cross an unwilling agnostic, an insomniac, and somebody with dyslexia?'"

"What do you get?"

"Someone," he says, grinning, "Someone who stays up all night torturing themselves over whether or not there really is a dog." 

CASE waits till he stops laughing to say, "You're not religious?"

Mann wipes his eyes, smile immediately fading. "Huh? Oh. No... That's, uh, something they drilled out of me back in _Lazarus_."

This world, though perfectly circular, is a tiresome one; once they agree that they have enough samples, Mann brings the boat around while CASE charts their return course. 

He feels isolated in this dark place, even though CASE is right beside him and able to call anybody up above at Mann's orders. The water skirts out before him, flat, space-like, and the boat's wake looks like a great white tear in the cosmos. Nothing like the wormhole he travelled through on his first mission.   

They come to shore with nothing but a quiet scrape of gravel and Mann jumps out, careful to avoid the water for fear of some unknown threat. A shark, maybe. 

It sends a shiver up his spine and he struggles to lift the heavy metal sample case out from inside the boat, anxious to get away from the shore. 

("What now, Dr. Mann?" CASE had said that first day. 

It was nice to be called  _doctor._

"Now, we analyse," Mann had said. 

"And then?" 

"Then we go out again.")

 

 

 

The night before he is due back above ground, Cooper takes the long climb down to visit him. They sit in deck chairs at the water's edge and drink from plastic cups. Cooper takes a sip, then frowns, tongue running along his bottom lip. 

"Tastes funny," he says. 

"That's because it's from down here," Mann replies, gesturing to the water. 

Cooper looks from Mann to the cup and back in surprise. "So it's safe?" 

"Uh-huh."

"But... that's great!" 

"Yeah." Mann narrows his eyes at the darkness, drinking hesitantly from his own cup. 

In a simple movement that arrests him entirely, Cooper brings his hand to rest upon his own free one, warm and calloused. 

"Murphy knows," he says, fingers drumming lightly over Mann's knuckles, "I told her the day you left."

"How is she taking it?"

Cooper looks him in the eye, all sad and blue, and says, "She's not angry, if that's what you're wondering." 

He takes his hand away and Mann has to fight the urge to grab it back. The still ocean still stretches before them like black ink, flat and still under the torchlight.

"Murph," Cooper says, enunciating carefully, "She... she understands, y'know? She's very _empathic_."

"Careful. Start using words like that and you'll lose your reputation as a country bumpkin."

Cooper laughs, long and loud, and Mann manages to dredge up a tight-lipped smile. He scuffs at the dirt around the water's edge with one shoe, and they sit silent for a long while.

Cooper's handheld beeps, altering them to the fast coming sunset.

"Better get up above ground," he says, making to stand up, "Murph'll be leaving soon and I want to say goodbye." 

"Okay." 

Cooper lingers at the base of the stairwell, brushing his hand over the railing. 

"You're not the best of them, Dr. Mann," he says after a while, and Mann looks up.

"You're not the worst, either." 

 

 

 

Cooper doesn't cry when Murphy's transport ship disappears from sight, but he doesn't smile either. 

 

 

 

Empathy rarely extends beyond our own line of sight, but Mann finds himself beginning to care more and more about this strange group of people he has found himself with, Romilly especially. He often spends long hours in the fields with him, holding a box of gardening tools while the other man tends meticulously to any sick or dying plants, patching them up.

(He never tries any of the things he's tried on Cooper with Romilly. Romilly says he's just happy to be amongst people again, and Mann can respect that just fine.)

He finds out that they lost a member of their team on Miller's planet; a quiet, steady man named Doyle who he only spoke to a couple of times back on Earth. Brand immediately closes up when he asks about it, angry that Mann has become privy to yet another one of their failures. Later, Cooper tells him to, "Maybe just not talk about the dead, hey doc?"

When the first residents start arriving, Mann mostly goes unseen. He continues working down in the cavern, never going down on as long a stint as he did the first time but still taking the stairs enough that the others have learnt not to ask what he's doing.

CASE never talks as much as TARS, but Mann doesn't mind that. It's nice to be able to slip through the darkness uninterrupted, dropping weights and taking measurements (so far, he has not found a bottom to this ocean).

When he surfaces one day to find yet another shuttle landing, wide-eyed travellers stumbling under the weight of their new planet's gravity, he merely blinks and keeps trundling towards the communal pod.

 

 

 

"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we hadn't had enough fuel?" 

Mann's shoulder brushes against his own as he turns, frown creasing his face. From the cliff above their research station, Edmunds' planet looks as flat and barren as his own did. 

"You mean, if we'd had to sling-shot past Gargantua?" 

Cooper nods, and there's a crunch as Mann bites into his apple, pilfered from one of the many orchards that has started cropping up in the east. 

"I don't know," he says, voice muffled by the mouthful of fruit, "If we passed right through its orbital pull, time would have gone pretty out of whack."

"Romilly says that decades would have passed."

"Yeah -" Mann spits out a seed, "- that sounds about right."

Something about the doctor's flippant tone annoys Cooper. He sets his jaw and turns away, staring instead at the steadily creeping darkness on the horizon. Brand and Romilly will be returning from the cornfields soon, rover weighed down with this month's harvest. The crops grow remarkably fast here. 

"Come on," he says, "Let's go." 

 

 

 

"That's the hundredth shuttle this week," he says to Romilly one day, gesturing to another batch of newcomers, "There's gotta be - what? - a whole country up there." 

"You'd be right," Romilly murmurs, pouring them a cup of coffee each. 

"I don't know how they're doing it." 

"Doing what?" 

"Evacuating the Earth." 

Romilly shrugs. "They have all the time in the world." 

 

 

 

More people come. The crew at the station struggle to house the planet's new occupants; Edmunds is starting to look less like a safe haven and more like a refugee camp. Rules have to be set in place. A sheriff from Cooper's old town arrives and they unanimously allow him to take control of the masses, preventing any of the anarchy that is sure to come. But it's hard.

Murphy's visits grow infrequent, and the equipment they need to build their new residences is running out fast. Cooper speaks to them less and less, the corners of his mouth drawn down in a look of dark determination.

Mann has been spending more and more time down in the cavern, attempting to get a plumbing network up and running, but it's hard when the only hand you have on deck doesn't _have_ hands. Or feet. Or a human face. 

Brand tells him not to worry, that they can last at least another year on the packaged stuff they have shipped from Earth, but Mann won't listen. He has become oddly fixated on this pet project they have given him, so much so that his skin turns pasty, pale, from the many hours spent underground. Romilly voices it one morning, when Mann isn't around.

"I'm worried he's isolating himself," he says.

"Why would he want to do that?" says Brand.

"I know I do."   

 

 

 

(It turns out they don't have all the time in the world.) 

 

 

 

Cooper watches, pale-faced and nail-biting as the reports flood in from Earth. Disease, famine, a second Dust Bowl colluding somewhere near the equator. People are dying from pneumonia faster than they have ever done before, even during the Great Depression, and when Murphy calls them on the communications screen Cooper can't help but note the slight rasp to her voice. 

He asks about the new equipment he sent for. 

"We're getting on it," Murphy assures him, "There's a lot going on at the moment, but we're getting on it." 

She sees the doubtful look on his face and attempts a smile.

"Hey, at least there aren't any dust storms on your planet, Dad."

True, but they are struggling to house people, and with every new batch of people seeking shelter, there is always one coughing and heaving from the shock of having clean air to breathe. 

 

 

 

He goes to Mann. 

 

 

 

"If the United States could just pick itself up off its ass and reconcile with all those European space stations, we could move everyone off the planet as fast as that."

"Yeah," says Mann, hunched over his test-tube rack. It is cool and dark in the cavern, and so deadly silent that Cooper can almost believe they are alone on this strange planet. 

"We need to get them out quickly," Cooper whispers.  

The bottle of whisky Mann nudges towards him goes unnoticed, so he tries for another kiss, figuring that the macromolecular stuff is far behind them now. The blank, unimpressed look Cooper gives him afterwards is almost as painful as the impending doom of life as they know it. 

"Get some sleep, Casanova," Cooper says, and thumps him on the shoulder. 

 

 

 

"Do you think animals know when they're about to die?" Brand says, looking up at the setting sun, "Or do you think it comes quick and suddenly for them, with no warning?" 

"We couldn't have brought them all with us," says Romilly, "We always knew that, even when we thought we were vying for Plan A." 

"I know," Brand replies, sounding as sad as she did the day they decided they were going to fly to Mann's planet and not to Edmunds'. "I know but it's not fair. We've killed them. He - my father - killed them _all_." 

He wraps an arm around her, a little dirt trickling over the cliff's edge as they shift closer together. 

"You know," he says, "for a people trying to escape suffocation, we sure as hell came to one dusty planet." 

When Brand laughs it sounds like _she's_ suffocating.

"Yeah," she says, "Yeah, we did."

 

 

 

 

In the end, it's Murphy.

 _It's always been Murphy,_ thinks Cooper as the relief washes over him. The story is reported on every TV in every home on every channel throughout the station: that on this day, a day that will go down in history, the spaceship _Endurance II_ \- funded and overseen by one Murphy Annette Cooper - officially left Earth's atmosphere for the last time, carrying all it could. There are those who did not wish to leave - there always are - but from NASA's calculations, at least 70% of the Earth's remaining population is currently onboard. 

_70%._

"Pretty fantastic isn't it?" Murphy says over the communications screen, her eyes bright. 

"Pretty fantastic," Cooper agrees.

Her smile is wide and mischievous, but he can't bring himself to believe that she knew they were safe this whole time; knew they were safe and kept it from them. There must have still been a sliver of doubt within her, something stopping her from believing that she could have possibly done something so good. She did not want to disappoint her father the same way he had disappointed her all those years ago.

But she hasn't. 

 

 

 

 

When the ship lands, it's like the whole sky has come crashing down with it. A dark shape blotting out the sun, perfectly circular like all the UFOs of their youth - like their planet.  

And when the first and last newcomers begin to disembark, Cooper feels Mann's hand bump against his own, then settle.

"You finish your aqueduct, Mr. Plumber?"

"For now," says Mann, sounding more sober of mind than he has in weeks. Maybe even years. 

They watch the ship power down, its little red lights slowly blinking out one by one. 

"Look, Cooper, about what happened on my planet..." Mann begins, the apology already blatant in his tone of voice. 

Cooper tells him to shut the fuck up. 

And privately, he wonders if all those fathers of the Bible - Noah, Abraham, Jacob, even Joseph - Saint Joseph, the carpenter, his namesake - ever felt this proud of their children. He thinks not. She has led humanity's exodus. And that is what they name it, in the end. The planet.

 _Exodus_.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- yessss like the shitty Ridley Scott movie. Don't laugh at me.  
> \- Mann's dumb ass joke is from "Infinite Jest," which I feel he'd appreciate on some level.  
> \- I know nothing about geology.


End file.
